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Stupid Hackers

Anyone who has visited this url before knows that there used to be a pleasant little site of my design portfolio. Yes, it was mint green and white titled “Laura Russell | Visual Communications”. Unfortunately this harmless little gem was a target to Arabic hackers.

After the horror of logging onto my site one day to find not only the destruction of my hard work, but also an abomination of rainbow typography and cursor-chasers in its place, I managed to restore the site to its former glory thanks to the back-ups from my gracious web host. Passwords changed, problem solved.

Or so I thought.

Someone else decided they would have some fun with laurarussell.ca. Now, I wish I had took some screenshots of the new hacker’s page, but I didn’t. So let me paint you a picture:

One afternoon at work, I casually decide to visit my site to reminisce over old work. What greets me when I press the return key is a black page featuring an oversized skull and crossbones with a blood red “F*CK YOU” delicately written up top in what I would guess to be 86 pt courier new. As a further gift, the armageddon of arabic music starts blaring from my speakers, attracting office-wide attention while it self-scrolls itself down the page to reveal more arabic writing (hackers love bright rainbow text on solid black backgrounds) with more randomly inserted f*ck you’s written in English, just in case I had missed it the first time.

And what did I do? I started laughing. I laughed until there were tears in my eyes.

It was one of those situations that was so pathetic that it became hilarious. This is what had become of my pretty little site. Now I look back hoping that at least one or two astonished and/or appalled people had browsed it in that state.

After reverting it back and changing passwords again, my original portfolio was back up and running once more.

Until they hacked it a third time. Not only had they hacked it this time, but used my address for fraud to get money and information from people (all that boring phishing stuff).

It was time to shut down the whole operation for good.

Everything that had to do with the domain was essentially destroyed with no hope of getting it back this time, which has turned out to be a blessing and a curse.

Sure, I lost all the work I had put in originally but if I’m honest with myself, it’s not even relevant anymore. It’s a time in my life for fresh beginnings.

So here I am now, if you want to know what this new site is about check it out here.